Trail lines: misaligned, incorrect position after update, resizing
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Dear All,
We have been using Fusion 360 commercially in our company for a while now and last year decided to migrate the construction, development and documentation of our in-house products to Fusion. I think I am at a point where I discovered a buggy behaviour which needs a bit of explanation, but which I encounter on a regular basis.
We would be gratefull if some of the following problems can be fixed or a workaround can be presented.
Before I go further into the problem at hand: due to confidentiality requirements I am unable to share the Fusion file. I will try my best to describe whats happenning as follows...
The product is a mechanical assembly consisting of ~250 parts, some of which are clustered in subassemblies. Our goal is to create explosion views of the 15 subassemblies with a BOM for each subassembly (a separate drawing sheet for each subassembly) and one big explosion view consisting of all exploded subassemblies. We used this approach to realize our project:
1. Modelling up all single parts and saving them in a separate fusion file.
2. Assembling all parts according to the order of installation (=timeline) including the subassemblies by inserting the parts as linked components into an overall assembly. All future steps take place within this assembly.
3. Creating first animation storyboard: the 15 subcomponents are exploded so we get an overview of the different subcomponents (single parts within a subcomponent are not exploded yet). We can create a drawing from this and use it as a cover sheet for our documentation.
4. For each subcomponent we create a new animation storyboard and select as type "start from end of previous storyboard". We hide all but one subcomponent and start exploding the parts of the current subcomponent as needed. For some parts we activate the "trail line visibility". This storyboard now contains the exploded view of only one subcomponent. After doing this with all 15 subcomponents we go into the drawing file from step 3 and create separate sheets for each subcomponent animation. We can add a BOM to these drawings.
At this point we created a total of 16 drawing sheets (1 "Overview" and 15 exploded subcomponents)
5. We create one final drawing sheeet, which contains as its base views the 15 animation storyboards of the subcomponents. This is our "big overview" in which we can see all the single parts and their place within the product assembly (without BOM).
The big advantage of this approach is the dependency down to the single parts. When there is change made to a part, we simply update all elements of the chain "part-assembly-animation-drawings". It takes quite a while to update but it works. Except for one thing.
FIRST PROBLEM:
After making a change on a single part we open the assembly and hit the yellow triangle in order to update the assembly. Upon completion the design is updated correctly, but the trail lines in the animation storyboards of the subassemblies are messed up. They are displaced by the amount which the subassembly is moved in step 3. As an effect, all the drawings are updated incorrectly because of the misaligned trail lines.
FIX: this can be easily fixed by going into the animation space, hitting "m" and clicking through all components with misaligned trail lines. The trail lines correct their position, we can save the assembly and update the drawings.
This beaviour is not a big deal for smaller assemblies, but for such a big one having to click through >100 parts in the different animation storyboards every time we make a change in the main product is tedious.
A SECOND PROBLEM: similar to first
During step 4 (exploding a subassembly in an animation which starts at the end of the previous animation) when activating the trail line visibility, the trail line will start at the point where the part is originally located in the design workspace, i.e. where it is at the beginning of the previous animation and not where it is a t the beginning of the active animation. This might be a deliberate choice or a bug...for our use case it is definitely a bug since we cannot activate the trail line for all parts we would like to.
A THIRD PROBLEM:
This is concerning the trail lines in general. After creating a trail line, its length can be manipulated by simply clicking on it and pulling the blue arrow. Unfortunately it can only be elongated and not shortened.
I hope that our problems are becoming clear from this explanation. I tried to regenerate them in a minimalistic example in a screencast:
The following steps are taken to reproduce the problem
0. Look at the correct display of the trail lines in "trail line problems" animation storyboard1, then close
1. Open part "A"
2. Change extrude from 85 to something larger like 200 and save
3. Open part "B"
4. Change extrude from 105 to something larger like 300 and save
5. open "trail line problems" in design mode and update changes
6. Look at animation storyboard1 and see the wrong display of trail lines
